My Hot Air Balloon Ride - March 25, 2008
Just
like the airlines, my ballon ride got cancelled twice. There was too much wind,
go figure it was just like Fargo. I was disappointed but flying home to North
Dakota in a ballon would not have been my idea of a good time. Although, we
did have cookies and champagne on board. So, the third time's a charm as the
saying goes and I was picked up at my hotel at 6 a.m. Tuesday morning.
There were 3 balloons which took flight the the day I took my ride. I was in the largest ballon, which held 11 people including the pilot. The pilot's name was Jack, and thus we called him Captain Jack. Yes, he was cute...AND married. We flew over the agricultural area of the Coachella Valley. We started in La Quinta and ended in some farmer's field.
I was surprised that I wasn't at all nervous standing in a weaved basket, made of who knows what, at 2,500 feet above the ground. The view was spectacular and it was very quiet when the hot air blower wasn't running. We could see the entire valley and it's cities; including the mountains (duh), the Salton Sea, and the area where the San Andreas fault line is located.
And when Captain Jack said you are at the mercy of the winds, you really are. We missed our first landing. I could tell we were coming in too high for the landing and thinking we might hit the trailer. I started thinking we would truley be dropping in for breakfast. Fortunately, our pilot knew this and added hot air to the ballon and took us up and over the trailer.
Another
mile or so down the way, we finally landed in a farmer's cilantro field. Captain
Jack did land the basket on a road instead of amongst the crops. I was glad
because I didn't want to see some Elmer Fudd wanna-be coming after us with
a shotgun.
We flew over the PGA West Golf Club, Merv Griffin's Ranch, and the Thermal airport.
Coachella Valley
The Coachella Valley is a large stretch of land in Southern California that is populated by close to a million people and which includes the famed tourist mecca, Palm Springs. The valley extends for approximately 45 miles in Riverside County southeast from the San Bernardino Mountains to the saltwater Salton Sea, the largest lake in California. It is approximately 15 miles wide along most of its length, bounded on the west by the San Jacinto Mountains and the Santa Rosa Mountains and on the north and east by the Little San Bernardino Mountains. The San Andreas Fault crosses the valley from the Chocolate Mountains in the southeast corner and along the centerline of the Little San Bernardinos. The fault is easily visible along its northern length as a strip of greenery against an otherwise bare mountain.
Salton Sea
The Salton Sea is an inland saline lake, occupying the lowest elevations of the Salton Sink, part of the larger Colorado Desert in Southern California, north of the Imperial Valley. The lake covers a surface area of approximately 376 square miles, the largest in California. While it varies in dimensions and area due to changes in agricultural runoff and rain, it averages 15 by 35 miles, with a maximum depth of 51 feet, giving a total volume of about 7.5 million acre-feet. Sea inflow averages 1.36 million acre-feet per year.
The Salton Sea, like Death Valley, is located below sea level. The current surface of Salton Sea is at about 220 feet below sea level. The deepest point in the Sea is only 5 feet higher than the lowest point in Death Valley.
The Salton Sea was formed between 1905 and 1907 when the Colorado River burst through poorly built irrigation controls south of Yuma, Arizona. Almost the entire flow of the river filled the Salton Basin for more than a year, inundating communities, farms and the main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad.